Video: Formatting text in CINEMA 4D

The formatting tools for text in Cinema 4D are fairly basic. I'm in Gears O2.C4D from the chapter six folder if you want to follow along. And I'm selecting my text layer here and you'll see down in the attributes manager in the object tab. I have a few options for formatting my text. But not many. Things like all caps isn't available so if I want to make these capital letters or upper case letters. I need to actually hold down Shift, or Caps lock, to type them. Okay, I've put in an extra letter there.

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8h 57mBeginnerAug 28, 2013Updated Jan 15, 2015

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Intimidated by 3D modeling packages? Dip a toe in the water with CINEMA 4D (C4D) Lite, a slimmed down version of CINEMA 4D included with After Effects CC. Motion graphics designer Angie Taylor shows you how to build a complete sequence in C4D Lite, progressing from initial object modeling, to animation, lighting, camera rigging, texturing, and final render. Plus, learn to animate text, create random movement with wiggle expressions, track cameras in live-action footage to add new 3D elements, and light your scene. Angie also round-trips the project files to After Effects for visual effects and color correction. With over 100 videos, this course allows you to explore almost every aspect of 3D motion graphics creation, within this accessible introductory tool.

Formatting text in CINEMA 4D

The formatting tools for text in Cinema 4D are fairly basic.I'm in Gears O2.C4D from the chapter six folder if you want to follow along.And I'm selecting my text layer here and you'llsee down in the attributes manager in the object tab.I have a few options for formatting my text.But not many.Things like all caps isn't available so if I want to make these capitalletters or upper case letters. I need to actually hold down Shift,or Caps lock, to type them. Okay, I've put in an extra letter there.

So, there's no all-caps option to easily switch on and off.As I said, the fonts are pretty muchall there, but you have to scroll through them.There's no way of quickly typing in a font nameand finding it, and you'll see here I've got quitea few on my systems if I want to change to Arial Black it takesme quite a while to do that really although it looks better on Arial Black.So I'm going to leave it on Arial Black.You have alignment options, you've got left, middle and right.I should expect to align it with the axes either on the left of thetext, the right side of the text or as it is here in the middle.

Of the text.And of course that will affect howit scales and how it rotates. Now, if we adjust the height, you'llnotice it adjusts the size of the text so I can adjust the size, which is great.And there're controls for horizontal spacing which is kind of like tracking.Okay?You can adjust the tracking or spacing.You can also adjust the vertical spacing, so if wewere working with one more than one line of text.So if I go backinto my text, objects tab, and put in a new line of text.

And then click away to accept it, you'll see I've now got two linesof text, and if I adjust the vertical spacing, that gives me control over that.In this case, we don't want that secondline of text, so I'm just going to remove it.Again, if you deselect, select your textagain and all the controls should appear here.So I'm going to put that back to zero.Now you can separate letters, we'll talka little bit more about separating letters andcreating animation later.Now you have got the option to adjust the planes,and that will adjust the way that it lies interms of in terms of on which planes it lies,and that will also have a strange effect on your extrusion.

Notice that Because the(UNKNOWN)is extruding in that direction we're getting quite astrange result when using a non X Y plane.You can reverse the planes as well which gives youa slightly different results if you go to X Y orX Z rather, and reverse it you can see there's areversal going on there doesn't really work very well on this.We'll have a look at that again a little bit later.Okay, and then there's various controlsdown here for things like angle.

Angle, you'll notice that's giving me less smoothness ifyou like in the curved areas of the text.So by bringing angle down to zero, we're not getting any angles.By increasing it, it's using angles instead of smooth curves to define.The curved edges of the text.So, a very short run-through of the formatting options.Now there're some controls obviouslyfor coordinates, obviously, and you have your basic controlsin here for, as you do with any other object.But if you want to do things like, maybe, shear the text, may be create an italicized versionof the text, the only way that you can doit is by really using one of these objects here.

And I'm going to use a sheer object to create an italicized loop for my text.SoI'm going to switch my view, first of all to thefront view, and I'm going to move my sheer nerb up.You want it to surround the text so we're going to selectour sheer nerb and we're going to go down into our object settings.And we're going to adjust the width.Okay, we can bring down the height a little bit.And to adjust the depth, we're going to look at that from the top view.

I can see enough thereto be able to do it.And I'll just move it back a little bit on that z axis.Okay, once we have it how we want it let's go back to ourfront view and what I'm going to do is drag the sheer nerb onto the text.Now at the moment it doesn't make any difference at all, but ifI start to adjust the strength you'll notice we can now sheer that text.Now at the moment it applies a curve, which is actually quitenice, but if I don't want the curve andI just want straight edges I can pull the curvature.

Down to zero.I've also got an angle value in there as well.And now, if I go back to this view, Ihave the effect of some initialized text if you like.So, if I save that and jump back to AfterEffects, you can see it's updated in my After Effects project.So all the formatting and all the sheer objectsand things that have applied will be updated in here.Now if I want to see that without the grand plane and sheerobject being previewed I can set the cinema for a D layer, open upthe effect and just go in here and change the render settings To standardfinal and we can see how our text looks composited against the gears.

So that's really a run through of whatformatting is available for you in Cinema 4D.When I create text I tend to use Adobe Illustrator to create my text.And then bring it into cinema 4D.I'm going to show you how to do that in the next movie.

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